A content provider may make a variety of informational content available online, such as product details, reference information, news, commentary, advertisements, and the like. The content provider may provide the content through a Web site or other information service available to users over a network, such as the Internet. The users may utilize a client application, such as a Web browser, executing on a user computing device to access the content information from the content provider.
The content may be presented to the client application as a “page” of information. The page may contain text, pictures, video, interactive user interface components, and the like. The information in the page is rendered to a display or other output device by the client application for presentation to the user. The page may be further divided into content sections containing specific types of information. For example, a typical Web page for a product offered for sale by an online merchant may contain a header section identifying the product; a left column section containing navigation information for the product information; center sections containing a product description, specifications, pictures, and other product details; a right column section containing purchase information or a purchase button for the product; and a footer section containing merchant identification, contact, and legal information.
The content sections in the page may be provided to the client application as a series of instructions for rendering the information to the display. For example, the content page may consist of a markup language, such as hypertext markup language (“HTML”) utilized for the presentation of Web pages. Client applications generally render the information described in the markup language in the order of its presentation on the page, from the top to the bottom. Consequentially, the content provider provides the markup language describing the content sections of the page to the client application in the order of the rendering of the sections. However, the nature of the content may require a considerable amount of time for the information service of the content provider to produce and/or transmit certain content sections of the page, delaying the display of other sections of information that are more readily available. The delays resulting from the generation and/or transmission of the larger or more complex content sections may result in longer page rendering times along with inefficient use of content generation resources and network bandwidth.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.